Bøger i Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics serien

This open access book focuses on the importance that EU politicization has gained in European democracies and the consequences for voting behaviour in six countries of the EU: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. Through a detailed, multimethod analysis this book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts in the media and parliamentary debates, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.

This edited volume brings together leading international researchers in an attempt to disentangle and understand the multiple conflicts of sovereignty within the European polity in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. While most research on sovereignty focuses on its international dimensions, what makes this volume distinctive is the focus on the mobilization of sovereignty discourses in national politics. Contrary to tired paradigms studying clashes between national and supranational sovereignty, the various chapters of the volume offer a provocation for the readers ¿ what if these old vertical conflicts of sovereignty are increasingly complemented by horizontal conflicts between executives and parliaments at both the national and international level?

This book interprets the relationship between Ireland and the European Union (EU). We are coming up to 50 years since Ireland acceded to the EU (2023), and the links between the two are unique and distinctive. The volume presents an original interpretation of Irish-EU relations, and this in turn has implications for a wider understanding of the EU. Its aim is to analyse the Irish-EU relationship from the idea of two apparently contradictory political ideas ¿ internationalism (as represented by European integration in this particular instance) and nationalism (long the dominant value in Irish politics). The authors argue that to date the contradictions have been managed with considerable ease, leading us to characterise the Irish-EU relationship as ¿nationalism within internationalism¿.

This book provides a comprehensive account of EU's renewable energy policy development as it traces the agenda-shaping, policy formulation and decision-making phases of the EU's secondary legislation on renewable energy ¿ that is the three successive directives of 2001 (RES-E), 2009 (RED), and 2018 (RED II). It also explores the EU's energy policymaking dynamics and assess integration outcomes of these three policymaking instances in the renewable energy field from a comparative perspective. Enriched with elite interviews with the Brussels policy community, and drawing on European integration and public policy literature, the proposed book will resonate with and offer relevant insights to students, scholars, stakeholders, and policymakers interested in EU energy policy, in particular, and European integration, in general.